Blue Nile Pulls Back on Lab-Grown Diamonds, Pivots to Curated Assortment

Blue Nile is deprioritizing lab-grown diamonds, which the brand only started selling in 2022 following its purchase by Signet. The pivot is part of a broader repositioning that will move the site away from the grid-style search experience that made Blue Nile a pioneer of online diamond retail — toward a more curated, elevated assortment built around natural stones.

Joan Hilson, Signet's chief operating and financial officer, told JCK that the shift is about curation rather than elimination. "They are still part of our platform and our virtual diamond marketplace," Hilson said of lab-grown diamonds. "We know that we [offer] a lot of choice [of diamonds], but we can help the customer curate, so they don't have to look through all of those choices on their own. We can help them navigate based on some of the specifications that they give us."

The grid browsing interface, long the backbone of Blue Nile's search experience, will survive the transition in a diminished role. The grids will still be on the site, Hilson said, but they won't be the basis of its business as they were in the past. The new iteration of Blue Nile will be positioned as more upscale than Jared, which is considered part of Signet's "accessible luxury" tier, along with Diamonds Direct. Hilson described the new Blue Nile as "primarily natural."

The Blue Nile repositioning arrives alongside Signet's decision to shut down the James Allen standalone website. Signet ended James Allen's days as a standalone retail website less than nine years after purchasing it for more than $300 million. James Allen had struggled recently: Signet incurred a $13 million impairment charge on the James Allen trade name last year, and the brand's sales dropped 33% to $142.5 million for the fiscal year. Signet will repackage the brand as a "proprietary collection" within Blue Nile, with complementary products and styles moving to that site. Consumers looking for lab-grown items in the James Allen collection will still be able to find them on Blue Nile's platform after the migration.

For shoppers committed to lab-grown engagement rings, Signet is pointing toward its other banners. Online buyers searching for lab-grown engagement rings can also purchase them from Signet's store brands Kay and Zales, Hilson said.

The physical retail experience at Blue Nile is also changing significantly. Signet is adding point-of-sale capabilities to Blue Nile's 23 showrooms, which will start to stock finished jewelry and engagement rings. Previously, those showrooms functioned as little more than conversion tools. Prior to this, Blue Nile's showrooms were simply vehicles to get customers to purchase online. Stocking finished pieces and enabling in-showroom transactions marks a meaningful shift for a brand whose entire identity was built around the screen.

Blue Nile serves a broad age range of more affluent customers, Hilson said, and Signet wants to evolve it into an elevated luxury brand with a focus on natural diamonds. As part of that move, the company is transitioning its portfolio from eight brands to four core banners: Kay, Zales, and Jared as brick-and-mortar chains, and Blue Nile as an online luxury platform.

Signet didn't discuss Diamonds Direct in depth on its recent conference call, but that division, purchased in 2021, is also going through changes. Last year, Diamonds Direct chief operating officer Tom O'Rourke was promoted to division president following the departure of longtime CEO Itay Berger, and while Diamonds Direct had been a standalone division, it now reports to Claudia Cividino, who has been president of Jared since 2023. Diamonds Direct's back-end has been integrated into Jared's.

What's being assembled at Blue Nile — a natural-first assortment, a curated browsing experience, transactional showrooms, and a brand tier positioned above Jared — looks like Signet's clearest statement yet about where it sees the online luxury diamond market heading.